ONCE...AND AGAIN

The first 17 years of separation passed easily, with each wondering, every now and then and without too much effort or care, what the other was like.

"What was his name?" the mother would ask herself. "How old was he when he took his first step? How tall was he now that he was in high school?"

The son would imagine that she must look just as he did, with a big round face and dark eyes. She must have been young when she gave him up for adoption, and probably poor, too. "Did she smile a lot?" he wondered. "Was she a good hugger?"

But Tony Chillino had another mother, whose hugs he didn't have to wonder about, a mother who had taken him into her home right after his birth and raised him in Knoxville, Tenn.

And a thousand miles south, in Tamarac, Jacquiline Cassio had a second son, her Joey, whose first step had filled her with joy and whose report card she had signed year after year.

It might have ended there. But Tony would lose his second mother, and a few months later, Jacquiline would lose her second son.

The years of separation passed painfully then, with each of them longing for the other, one decade, then another, hoping a reunion would make up for what was twice lost and still grieved.

Earlier this month in a Knoxville airport terminal, they finally embraced.

"Is it wonderful?" Jacquiline asked him, her tears pressed up against his cheek.

"I feel better," he choked back. "I feel better."

After Francis Van Allen was born 37 years ago, Jacquiline had locked herself in her room for three days and three nights. If she saw the baby even once, even for an instant, she would have to hold him and once she did that, she would have to keep him, too.

"You be my eyes, you be my heart," she told her mother, who went without her to the observation room. He's a chubby, happy baby, her mother said when she came back. He has dark skin and big beautiful brown eyes.

She was 18, young just like her son would someday guess, and poor too, the daughter of a waitress who had long ago left a hard-drinking husband.

She was also a Catholic who believed abortion to be a sin. Marriage to the father was not an option either. He yelled at her if he caught her talking to another guy, and once he even pushed her hard against a car door. It wouldn't be long before he started hitting her, too, she told herself after learning she was pregnant with his baby.

"A nice Italian family." That was all the adoption agency told her when she signed her son away. She comforted herself with the words of her mother. "It's better this way. Better for you and better for him."

She soon found comfort in a husband, too, a real estate agent and a hard-working man who provided a house and a good income. And, when Joey was born, she had a way to let go of her grief for good. She had another son after him, and while she loved Kevin just as much, Joey was the one who was just like her.

He was unafraid to say, "I love you," out loud and every day, not shy about hugging and kissing and handholding.

When he was still a boy he saved his quarters and then inserted them one after another into a gumball machine that eventually delivered to him a plastic ring as big and shiny looking as the one his mother already had.

"I wanted it to be just like the one Dad gave you," he said when he handed it to her.

He was hard-working like his father. He saved the money he was earning as a clerk at a nearby gas station to buy a pickup truck. On some nights his mother would worry about him there alone and after dark, and she would cook his dinner and drive it to him and they would talk while he ate.

But she was busy on that summer night 20 years ago when he died. Witnesses only heard a single shot, and then saw a man bend over a body digging a wallet out of the pocket and then fleeing, never to be found.

At the hospital, Jacquiline's eyes searched all over her son's body. Where could she hug him? Where could she hold him? He was just 16. What part of him could still feel her love? What part of him still held his? His cheeks were gray, and she could tell just by looking that they were cold, too, his eyes were closed forever. Her hand went to his hair.

She stroked it, gently, again, one more time. And then he was gone.

Elizabeth Chillino was gone, too. Her son, 17, had come home from school one day a few months earlier and realized as soon as he saw the cars in the driveway that she was dead. The aneurysm in her heart had killed her.

He had always known he was adopted, but that didn't make it any easier. His mother had raised him as she had her three daughters, with home-cooked meals and bedtime stories and cheering on the sidelines of his soccer games. He was the son she and her husband had always wanted, and he was a hugger and hand-holder, too, not shy about "I love you." While his parents never kept his adoption secret, they didn't like to talk about it either.

"I'm your mother and nobody else," she had said once, crying when he asked about it.

In the years after her death, he thought more about finding his birth mother. He tried at first in small ways, going through his adoption papers, asking his father a question now and then.

But he didn't want to try too hard or too fast lest his father feel unwanted, and then there was college to go to and then a wife and then a daughter and another, and a career as a builder, and the years passed.

It was fear that kept Jacquiline Cassio's search from going too hard and too fast. For a year after her son died she had kept herself drunk. For a year after that the sound of people laughing or of music made her cringe with rage that anyone should dare to be happy around her.

Only when Kevin, her last son, said to her one day, "I need a mother, too," did she try to mask her grief.

She cried in solitude then, year after year, fearful that if she ever did find the son she had given up he would be in jail, or on drugs, or dead. Such a thing might destroy her for good, for she had learned twice now that there is nothing in life quite so bad as losing a child.

"It's a knife in your heart," she said. "The pain is there everyday and if you pull it out, you're going to bleed to death."

When she retired from her job as a mail clerk last year, she resolved to start looking for him. She was young still, only in her mid-50s, and ready at last to risk finding out whether that "nice Italian family" had done a good job with her beautiful brown-eyed baby.

Tony had begun searching in earnest, too, and while he talked little of his efforts to his father, pretending that it wasn't such a big deal, he knew now the surname he was born with.

He had called the adoption agency, which had sent him his family history, but only after blotting out any reference that might reveal the identity of the family members themselves. But the name "Francis Van Allen," his name, appeared on a line the clerk had overlooked.

"Really the stroke of a pen was the difference here," he said. "There was just one place where it said the name."

He searched the Internet for Van Allens living in South Florida and sent out 37 letters to all of the addresses he found.

Two months ago, a woman called, a Marjorie Van Allen, sister of Jacquiline Cassio, formerly Jacquiline Van Allen. Yes, Jackie had a son she had given up for adoption, and yes, that would be 37 years ago, and yes, it would be OK to call her.

Robert George can be reached at 954-356-4727 or bgeorge@sun-sentinel.com.